There should be a big dif between analog sd and DVB-T HD, many tv's have freeview built in but are not Full HD, the picture dif is only slight on HD Ready tv's as opposed to Full HD, check the specs on your tv
I personally don't agree with "if you sit x metres away from a x sized screen you won't see any difference between SD and HD". That is bollocks, namely, 1. you are assuming everyone has the same eye sight and 2. you aren't considering the Native resolution of the TV; even on my FullHD 32" TV I can appreciate the difference between HD and SD. In fact, I can notice the difference between 720p and 1080i/p, my parents don't as much. (This is using my HTPC to render game screens in order to minimise any bitrate differences between channels.)
The most important factors here, IMHO are the relative bitrates, compression, profiles & codecs used by the different channels, combined with whether or not the program has actually been shot and broadcast in HD, or merely upscaled.
I have found SKY Sport & SKY movies to offer the best broadcast picture image, followed by TV3 and then the TVNZ channels (when showing native HD content), I haven't yet bothered with the sample HD channel. But the extra bandwidth provided by 1080p Bluray absolutely blows all of them out of the water, that is the power of a bitrate that is 4x that of anything on DTT channels.
. (This is using my HTPC to render game screens in order to minimise any bitrate differences between channels.)
One thing you've got to take into account is image scaling, when you scale a 720p image to a 1080p screen you're going to get upscaling aliasing, there's nothing you can do about that.
If you had two identical TV's, and the only difference was the native resolution, then it would be much harder to tell the difference
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